The World Health Organization’s World Health Report 2007 deals with access to primary health care as an essential prerequisite for health.1 It acknowledges the importance of the Alma-Ata declaration of 1978, which called for integrated primary health care as a way to deal with major health problems in communities and for access to care as part of a comprehensive national health system. Yet the mission of Alma-Ata-to provide accessible, affordable, and sustainable primary health care for all-has been implemented only partially in developing countries.2 We have therefore instigated the “15by2015” campaign (www.15by2015.org), which proposes a funding mechanism for strengthening primary health care in developing countries.

In the accompanying analysis article, Gillam notes that most developing countries have failed to provide even basic primary healthcare packages. Weaknesses in primary healthcare services often result from a variety of forces, including economic crises and market reforms, which limit the range and . . .

Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909

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